Clamouring For Cricket

I have long been a cricket fan and played it as a young man. This summer we have seen probably the best test match series ever and has left much of the public clamouring for more cricket, of course, this is generally great for the game but a niggling thought keeps coming to mind. The game has changed, it’s faster, more exciting and without doubt, more entertaining and unfortunately, more commercial.

Professional cricketers do, of course, deserve to make a good living; I just hope that salaries don’t rise to the obscene levels we see in football. Apart from being a much more tactical and interesting game, there’s a major difference between cricket and football; there is still some sport in cricket, it’s not all about money, football is largely money and tribalism. Sadly though, the first small signs of loutish behaviour are becoming visible, again, we must make sure it does not increase to football levels. On a positive note, I think cricket will never reach the level of popularity that football has and so will be less susceptible to infiltration by the wrong kind of “fan”.

I found the singing of “Jerusalem” and the excessive English patriotism to be mildly puke-making. This is the sort of thing we must guard against, patriotism is generally never a good thing in the long run; it undermines sportsmanship and encourages those of limited intellect, to be violent.

Football would be much improved if it’s customers behaved more like cricket supporters, can you imagine a group of soccer fans going to a match dressed perhaps as babies, complete with nappies (diapers) and dummy teats (pacifiers). Somehow, I can’t see that, the average football fan doesn’t seem to have that kind of personal assuredness. Since the prime reason for a football club’s existence is to make money, I’m surprised the owners are crap businessmen (maybe that’s why takeovers are happening), they aim their product (the game) at only a third of the population; women and children are largely not catered for! You’d think they would want to capture as many customers as possible but fail to provide the atmosphere (and safety) at a football match to make it attractive to families. They would do well to emulate the Americans in this respect; they are much better at managing the business of sports than the British.

This post is supposed to be about cricket, I’d better conclude with it! The plan to make cricket on TV payview will, I hope, be scotched. I am really annoyed that one of the few things worth watching on televison is not remaining free-to-air. I realise that commercial television has to aim it’s programming at the masses in order to be attractive to advertisers and cricket is, as yet, not followed by the masses. However, the BBC is paid handsomely to provide us with programming a cut above the (largely) crap produced by commercial TV and had the cricket rights in the past, why can’t they have it again!

So come on BBC (yes I’m on your case again) stop behaving like a dumb-ass commercial company, forget all that New Age, sensationalist nonsense that you seem to be in love with. GET THE CRICKET BACK ON!!!